Cathy Alter might claim that women's magazines saved her life, but we're a little more skeptical. To crib a line from Cher Horowitz, looking for advice in a Cosmo quiz is as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie, and yet, something about the title of this quiz enticed me: Are You Destined For Success? Feeling reasonably content with my career trajectory, I thought to myself, I am totally going to ace this idiot quiz. How wrong I was! My lack of ruthlessness or duplicity caused Cosmo to term me an "Undetermined Dawdler." (BURN!!!) Here's the first question: "While shopping, you and a pal spot a top that you both love, but there's only one left. Do you let her have it?" The options are: A) Yeah, it's not worth fighting over. B) Hell no, you'll tear it out of her hands if you have to. C) You try to steer her toward another shirt that would look much hotter on her, hoping she'll take the bait. I chose A, because, you know, she's my friend and it's just a shirt. Wrong answer!

Cathy Alter's life was a mess. She was divorced, unhappy, lost, etc. So she spent under 200…
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I did the quiz again and chose B), and that got me labeled "Blindly Ambitious," which, in Cosmo world, is a no no. Because showing your ambition makes you seem like an undainty "bulldozer," and nobody likes that in a lady. Just for the good of womanity, I took the quiz a third time, and chose C) and other answers that were similarly manipulative. Like for the question, what do you do when you hear that your crush is dating another girl, you're supposed to "Snoop around to find out how serious they are. If it's just a casual thing, you can still make a play for him." When I choose those sorts of passive aggressive responses, Cosmo was delighted, and called me a "savvy goal-getter" who could manage to be simultaneously "likely to succeed…and likable." Sigh. The takeaway: stabbing your coworkers and friends in the back with your fuck-me heels is a-ok by Cosmo standards as long as you have a shit-eating grin on your perfectly glossed lips.